Welcome to the second edition of Silver Bulletpoints. If you missed last week’s debut, the premise of this column is simple: Each week, I cover three topics related to the 2020 primary in 300 words or less.

Bulletpoint No. 1: The polls tell us Biden is a half-step in front of everyone else

This week, we evaluated what one can learn from early polling. Answer: more than you might think. For instance, a well-known candidate polling like Biden (about 28 percent in national polls) should win the nomination about 35 percent of the time, other factors held equal. But polling like Elizabeth Warren (around 7 percent) works out to roughly a 3 percent chance, other factors held equal.

I’m emphasizing “other factors held equal” because polls aren’t the only thing to look at. But they do provide a reality check.

Suppose you’re a GM preparing for the NFL draft and you have a simple algorithm that sorts college quarterbacks into two groups. In Group 1, historically, 35 percent of quarterbacks have become star players. In Group 2, 3 percent have.

A scout comes to you, says he’s evaluated every factor, more than the algorithm considers, and you should draft a Group 2 quarterback ahead of a Group 1 guy.

Do you buy it? Maybe. But that’s putting a lot of faith in the scout. The algorithm tells you the Group 1 player is about 12 times more likely to succeed. Perhaps you can overcome that prior with a deeper analysis, but the circumstances should be special.

So here’s where I have the candidates in my revised, still-subjective-but-now-more-poll-driven tiers:

Nate’s not-to-be-taken-too-seriously presidential tiers

For the Democratic nomination, as revised on April 26, 2019

Tier

Sub-tier

Candidates

1

a

Biden

b

Harris, Sanders, Buttigieg

2

a

Warren, O’Rourke

b

Booker, Klobuchar, Abrams*

3

a

Castro, Gillibrand, Inslee, Yang

b

Bennet*, Hickenlooper, Ryan, Bullock*

* Candidate is not yet officially running but is reasonably likely to do so.

Bulletpoint No. 2: Kamala Harris is doing fine, but where are her endorsements?

You’ll notice my tiers don’t exactly follow the polling. Instead, I have Harris in the bottom half of Tier 1 with Buttigieg and Sanders even though her polling isn’t as strong. That’s actually a demotion from before, when I had her at the top of Tier 1 with Biden.

Maybe it helps to define the tiers more precisely. Here’s how I think of them:

Tier 1: Things are coming together, to one degree or another. Maybe not everything has gone exactly to plan, but events are broadly in line with a script where the candidate takes a fairly linear path to the nomination.

Tier 2: Things aren’t quite coming together now, but it’s reasonably easy to imagine how they could in the future.

Tier 3: Things aren’t coming together now, and there’s no particular reason to think they will. But it wouldn’t be entirely shocking if they did. The candidate isn’t quite waiting in the wings, but maybe they’re backstage — waiting to wait in the wings.

Warren epitomizes what I think of as a Tier 2 candidate. She’s not polling like one of the front-runners. And her endorsements and fundraising totals don’t have her at the top of the field. She may still be dealing with the fallout of her DNA test, so you wouldn’t say her campaign has gone according to script.

From ABC News:

Senator apologizes for her claims of an American Indian heritage

But it’s easy enough to imagine scenarios where she becomes a front-runner. Voters could gradually overcome their doubts about her electability. Or she could maybe reorient perceptions if she keeps focusing on policy. Rank-and-file voters don’t care that much about policy, but being policy-focused can be a good way to get favorable media coverage and influence party activists.

There are a lot of plausible answers, but this tweet from Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of the socialist magazine Jacobin, suggests one explanation:

For a layer of intellectuals, policy people, and other professionals, supporting Warren is a way to signal genuine concern with the US and support broadly egalitarian fixes, while still not crossing the Rubicon. It’s understandable. For the rest of us, it’s Bernie. pic.twitter.com/YejpX2HEWa